Inquest hears how farmers rescued 401 victims

OPP Constable Lee Batte was tending to the injured on the field next to Highway 401, the flames from the burning cars and trucks hot on her face, when, she remembers, seeing the farmers.

They were driving their pickups over the plowed fields. They had come to help, even an 85-year-old man with his ATV, and they began ferrying the injured to safety and carting in medical supplies from the ambulances.

It is one good memory from a horrifying day.

"I don't ever want to see it again," Constable Batte said in an interview during a break in testimony at a coroner's inquest yesterday. The inquest is looking into an 87-vehicle pileup last September that killed eight people.

Constable Batte stayed on the highway for almost 11 hours -- on what was supposed to have been the start of her holidays.

She helped save Wade Brown from his mangled car, calming him while he begged her to call his wife. Then she attended his funeral when he died in hospital 12 days later.

She sat with Sheila Gayles from New York, who'd been rescued after she was crushed between cars -- and who was about to find out that she lost her entire family, including her stepdaughter, Marceya McLamore.

Pinned from the waist down while trying to run off the highway, emergency crews had tried to get the girl free. "I'm only 14," she'd cried. But the fire came on too fast, and too hot, fed by leaking diesel, ruptured gas tanks, and even the wooden furniture one of the trucks was carrying.

When the flames spread, the girl was still trapped -- one of seven people who died on the highway that morning.

The inquest into the 401 crash -- one of Ontario's worst ever, along a treacherous stretch of highway nicknamed "Carnage Alley" -- is only two days into testimony expected to last weeks, but all the talk, so far, has been about the almost-mystical fog of last Sept. 3.

It was like nothing they'd seen before, every witness has said. It came out of nowhere, thick like a wall, and the tractor trailers and cars drove blindly into it.

The collisions lasted, one witness testified, only two minutes. And when the fog lifted, minivans were squeezed under tractor trailers, trucks were stacked on top of each other, the back wheels of one Honda Accord was touching its front wheels.

There were 87 vehicles altogether -- junkyard scraps, really, in the pictures shown at the inquest yesterday. The Honda Accord, torched in the fire, is just a flat, square piece of steel. Incredibly, its passengers escaped in time. The job of reconstructing the crash fell to OPP Constable Kevin Armstrong, a veteran at the time of 283 traffic accidents, many on Highway 401.

He was one of the first to tour the scene after the fire was finally doused. He compiled the witness statements from surviving drivers -- all but one said they'd been travelling less than the posted speed limit of 100 km/h when they hit the fog.

On the stand yesterday, Constable Armstrong described the final steps of the victims, among them 25-year-old Randy Spotton, who was crushed just as he stepped from his vehicle to make a dash for the embankment. He was found, Constable Armstrong explained, "half in, half out" of his car, entangled in burned metal.

His younger brother, Mike Spotton, who was driving but survived, is expected to testify; he wants the province to install fog warnings on the 401.

Constable Armstrong said there was no way of predicting such fog.